


Where You Are

by magelette



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 07:07:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17039087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magelette/pseuds/magelette
Summary: All her life, Daja had struggled to keep her feelings locked down tight. Was she ready to open her heart to her family again, after having been separated for so long? Would she ever find happiness right where she was? Takes place in the first chapters of "The Will of the Empress."





	Where You Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [palmedfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/palmedfire/gifts).



_There comes a day  
When you're gonna look around  
And realize happiness is  
Where you are_  
\-- _Moana_

Daja had never been particularly transparent as a child. She wasn’t happy-go-lucky as one of her cousins, content to waft through life on the breeze from one pleasant circumstance to the next. She didn’t let her words fly loose on the wind like pollen, and her dreams and desires were always battened down tight like a hatch, next to her heart. Anytime she’d displayed her interest in making things, in metals, in working with her hands as a child, she’d been whipped for it. Tsaw'ha did not dirty their hands. They traded or paid others to do it for them. Family had been everything to her; her world had centered around Third Ship Kisubo. That had been all she allowed herself to know just so she’d be content. She might not be happy or deliriously in love with her life, but it was hers, and she could be content if she tried. She had always carried her burdens alone, even before the mimander declared her trangshi and exiled her from everything she knew. A burden shared is a burden easier carried, but who can afford to depend on others for help all the time?

Except she, Daja Kisubo of Winding Circle, of Discipline cottage, could afford to depend on others through earthquakes and pirates, fires and plagues, before her foster family had exiled her a second time from everything she held dear – from almost everyone who made her happy.

When she thought back to that moment when she was just ten years old, she could remember the shivers that wracked her body from the moment she first held her trangshi staff – as tall as she was, made of ebony, capped at brass with both ends. The moment she saw the blank caps, her stomach fell somewhere south of her feet and her very body seemed to chill from the inside out. Her throat had closed up until she almost couldn’t breathe, and she’d only been able to take the staff, completely numbed by the shock of it all. All her life, she had closed herself off in defense, but no amount of shelling up and battening down would protect her this time.

She hadn’t cried then, even when her status was changed in the logbook from beloved daughter of Third Ship Kisubo to outcast. The entire journey from Nidra Island, Niko had given her hesitant looks, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with someone who wouldn’t (couldn’t) cry. Niko had kept up a light patter of conversation with their traveling companions, but all the while, his large, black eyes had stared at her, as if he were trying to see into her soul. No one saw past her defenses, she’d never let them. No one would want to see into her soul. Until she found herself bound by magic and love to three crazy kaqs, and they’d become a family.

Against her better judgment, Winding Circle, Discipline, and Frostpine’s smithy had become home. For four years, she allowed herself to become like one of Briar’s baby plants and set down fragile roots. Summersea and its bustling market square would never be home like Third Ship Kisubo was, but there was something to the city’s rhythms that echoed in her own heart. It helped that Daja had finally found what she needed to acknowledge: her ambient magic, her love of working with her hands, how metal sang for her when she touched it to the fire and created with it. In Summersea, she was _happy._

Frostpine and Lark and Rosethorn were right: at some point, Daja and her siblings were bound to outgrow Discipline and even Winding Temple. Their years apart had done them some good, getting them out into the world and teaching them that there were other ways of doing things: magic, thinking, courtship, love, even family. Daja had allowed Frostpine to uproot her, fragile ties and all, because he said it was a ‘growing experience’ and ‘good for her.’ The journey, especially those moons in Kugisko, only reinforced this idea that humanity was divided into darkness and light, evil and good, and sometimes one might masquerade as the other. She would never forget Ben Ladradun. Someday, she might even forgive him for the lessons he’d taught her.

Nothing had prepared her, though, for that ultimate betrayal: Frostpine’s admittal that she couldn’t go back home again, that Discipline and Winding Circle would never _be_ her home again. Once again, she was marked Outsider and thrust into the world without warning. Once again, she couldn’t look into the eyes of the person who had changed her reality so radically. Once again, she refused to cry, couldn’t let herself cry because she had sworn that she would never let her heart be ripped out of her chest like that again. She battened down her hatches and hid her heart, so that later, she could try and salvage it once again.

Looking back on it, she knew that her fostermothers and Frostpine had, all in their own way, tried to prepare Daja and her siblings. But none of them had listened. Maybe it was because their four years of Discipline had bound them together in unexpected ways – unusual ways, when Daja really thought about it. They thought they could defy every odd because of who they were: certified magicians at a young age, a force to be reckoned with. At least there was comfort in that thought. She wouldn’t be alone in her exile. There would, once again, be someone to help carry the burden, if only she could let herself depend on them again.

So here she stood, staring up at a nondescript house on a nondescript street (were there enough cheesemakers in Summersea to need their own street?), Tris’ imagined commentary on the cost of the neatly-planted garden, the solid ironwork around the windows, the sturdy walls that enclosed it, even the location, which was apparently quite fashionable to Summersea’s upwardly mobile merchant class. Three stories seemed a little much for one person. Gardening had never been her calling, and the grounds themselves were too much for one person who had a black thumb, rather than a green one. And while she appreciated the forge, she had no need of all the outbuildings.

She might not need them, but maybe others in her family would.

The kitchen was spacious, the third floor library decadent, and the bedroom that opened out onto the garden had just the right light and amount of windows for someone to create an indoor growing space. There was room for a giant dog, a servant or two, and several siblings, if they’d have her.

If they’d have her.

She had tried so hard to bottle up her feelings since Frostpine had disrupted the fragile peace of her homecoming. It had taken all of the poise and diplomacy she had learned in the past four years to put on the guise of a young adult, ready to set up their own household. She wouldn’t let herself get excited or attached, but picked furnishings and trinkets to fill her house with expediency and as little feeling as possible. She tried not to let herself dwell on what would happen if her siblings did reject it – her. She was creating a home for herself, and if she happened to find some objects that reminded her of the three others who shared her heart, well, happy circumstance.

Number 6 Cheeseman Street was large, but lonely. It would take more than just her to make it a home. It’s true that she could probably find others like her – a partner, business associates, even Traders who might be in the area – to fill it, but she already knew exactly who she wanted to fill each room. While she tried not to hope, and tried not to build her idea of home on the three people she had shared mind-space with, she couldn’t get them out of her heart. She couldn’t quit them. She wasn’t sure she was ready yet to let them back in. They’d all grown, and there were parts of her heart that she wasn’t sure she was ready for them to see, especially not Sandry. It would hurt her most of all if her saati judged her and found her lacking. Or, worst of all, changed.

Someday. She promised herself that, should her siblings return home to her, she would open herself up to them again. She just hoped that they wouldn’t rip her up by the roots, because she wasn’t sure she could take losing a home and a family one more time.

_You'll be okay  
In time you'll learn just as I did  
You must find happiness right  
Where you are_  
\-- _Moana_


End file.
